Watching Claire McCaskill makes me think this tweet from yesterday, which infuriated some folks, has some merit. McCaskill illustrates why many liberals secretly believe that the Dems won't have their back in a fight. Here's why that matters to the emotional logics at play. https://twitter.com/gnrosenberg/status/1324032011695198211

The big response yesterday was that people were sad for good reasons: gov gridlock leading to more death, no structural transformations, confirmation of what they feared about America, no repudiation of Trumpism. These are all sad things and you're right of feel sad about them!

But the question is whether you *truly* believed a sweeping Biden victory--Biden!--would deliver these things. You may *think* you believed it possible, but did you *feel* like it was possible? Did you emotionally believe that a sweeping victory would mean court packing?

Maybe you did. But I suspect that many of you doubted this, despite what you hoped. You may have had a slightly queasy knot in your stomach, or a nagging suspicion that judicial reform would never make it through the senate even with solid Democratic control.

I suspect that, for many people, you thought the Dems would let you down. That when it really came down to it, they'd pull up short of the finish line. I think that most liberals have internalized political loss such that is at the core of their political identity.

I don't want to get into adjudicating whether they are correct to feel this way. I'm sure, for example, folks could point to Obama's wins. Or they will note that there are structural and political forces dooming structural transformation besides the "will" of Dem leaders.

The point isn't whether the feelings are right or wrong. It's that they are the emotional structure through which people are processing the narrow Biden victory. And that gets back to the point yesterday about seeking vindictive pleasure in a time of exhausted agency.

If you don't feel that even a massive victory will yield the structural transformation you know the country needs, what are you left with? What is the tangible and immediate pleasure you can be certain is available?

Again, in a culture of pervasive normal violence, many people also come to believe that *pain* is the only authentic experience that remains--the only thing truly and inescapably grounded in reality, that cannot be manipulated, faked, manufactured, contrived, and spun.

If you happen to believe both of these things--or rather "feel" both of these ways--you have this situation: emotional skepticism of the positive possibilities of structural transformation from a sweeping victory but certainty that a sweeping victory will cause pain to Trumpkins.